By the time Janeese Lewis George sat down toward the back of Dukem Ethiopian Restaurant on a recent October evening, the kitchen was already crossing items off the menu.
After nearly three decades anchored near the corner of D.C.’s 12th and U Streets, the neighborhood landmark was days from closing for good. News of the farewell had collided with Howard University’s homecoming, packing the dining room with longtime patrons, visiting alumni and curious newcomers — all chasing one last meal. So when the next mayor of Washington politely asked for a lemonade, co-owner Lydia Tefera had to break the news: There was none left.
Lewis George settled for a pineapple juice, pulled her toddler son, Pierce, onto her lap and tried to catch her breath.
She had slipped in after a whirlwind day bouncing from a morning senior jubilee in Ward 4 to an afternoon climate summit at Georgetown University, before dashing across town for day care pickup. Now, she was trying to fold family dinner into a campaign shoot, with a reporter in tow. To carve out a pocket of quiet from the crowded dining room, staffers had pushed two tables together. Her husband, Kyle, sat across from her pouring a Habesha beer. To her left sat Tefera. A campaign videographer hovered just beyond arm’s reach, framing shots for a social media tribute to the business. And Pierce, who had just abandoned a toy red double-decker at a nearby table, was settled in his mother’s arms, zeroed in on the food.
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When the wide platter arrived mounded with injera, spicy lamb tibs and collard greens, Pierce reached for a piece of sambusa pastry bigger than his hand and shoved it toward his mother’s mouth. Accepting the bite, Lewis George explained her philosophy for tackling the meal. “You’ve gotta mix the collard greens, with the tibs, with the sauce,” she said. “You’ve gotta eat it together. You can’t eat it one by one. You’ve gotta merge it all together.”
Lewis George’s political ascent over the past six years has been fueled by that organizer’s conviction: You can govern an unequal, divided city by pulling competing factions to the same table and forging them into a fragile consensus. But stepping into the mayor’s suite means confronting a job defined by hard limits — where not every crisis can be fixed and governing requires telling allies no.
Even at Dukem, she couldn’t resist trying to troubleshoot. Between takes for the camera, she pressed Tefera on how the District’s government could help other small businesses replicate that kind of longevity — wondering aloud why the city had never closed U Street to cars for an “Open Streets” festival to drive foot traffic, before floating the idea of a pop-up so the restaurant wouldn’t disappear entirely.
“Everything else can leave and go, but certain things have to stay,” Lewis George said. “I always thought this was one of those places.”
Once the camera stopped rolling, the conversation turned to the pressure awaiting Lewis George herself. Throughout her rise, the 38-year-old democratic socialist has insisted that she does not have to compartmentalize — that she can champion an unapologetic left-flank agenda and maintain warm personal ties with ideological rivals while fiercely guarding her boundaries as a working mother.
What worries her most about the mayor’s office, she acknowledged at the table, is not the day-to-day grind of running the bureaucracy, but the psychological isolation that comes with the executive role.
“Individuals who become mayor risk changing their personality a bit,” D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson observed. “On the side of the Council, there will be a degree of deference that did not exist when she was simply a colleague.”
Earlier that fall, she had met three fellow council members from across the political spectrum — Brooke Pinto, Christina Henderson and Zachary Parker — for their regular quarterly dinner. The venue this time was Stan’s Restaurant, an unpretentious basement haunt near McPherson Square. Over drinks and fried chicken, the table raised the question hanging over her impending victory: Would she still show up once she had the veto pen?
“They were like, ‘J, are you going to be able to do this — our dinners and stuff?’” Lewis George recalled. “I was like, ‘We have to force me to do it.’ No matter what, don’t let the hard decisions make you ostracized from people. Because the moment you break away and create division, that’s where all those things fester.”
On Nov. 3, voters made Lewis George the eighth elected mayor of the nation’s capital, ushering in the end of the Muriel Bowser era. It marks the District’s first mayoral transition in a dozen years — a stretch so long that come January, Mendelson will be the only remaining lawmaker on the 13-member dais whose council tenure predates Bowser. For Lewis George, who first won her council seat in 2020, taking charge of a $22 billion municipal government means inheriting a hostile Trump administration alongside an $800 million budget deficit and a commercial tax base hollowed out by remote work — economic realities that have left the downtown business community deeply anxious about her progressive agenda.
Over the course of the fall campaign, The Washington Sun followed Lewis George across community forums, policy summits, church sanctuaries and quiet restaurant tables to examine how she is preparing for power. Across those rooms, one central question surfaced time and time again: Can a movement organizer who built her career on radical accessibility and consensus-building govern a fractured, fiscally strained capital without breaking the relationships that put her there?
“I recognize that some of my close people will be on the other side of me now, because their job is to push the system forward, to push change and to push progress,” she told The Sun on Election Day. “We know that in January, the roles change and it’s their job to push me and our administration to do better.”
The Six-Year Sprint
When Lewis George challenged a Bowser-backed incumbent for the Ward 4 Council seat in 2020 as a democratic socialist insurgent, party insiders dismissed her as a long shot. Instead, she won handily, propelled by deep roots in the community she sought to represent.
Raised in Ward 4, Lewis George — the proud daughter of a union postal worker and granddaughter of a D.C. Public Schools lunch lady — is a third-generation Washingtonian who often traces her politics to the economic pressures her own family weathered, including being priced out of their childhood home by rising rent. After leaving the city to earn her undergraduate degree at St. John’s University in New York, she returned home for law school at Howard University, eventually cutting her teeth as a juvenile prosecutor under D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine — frontline municipal experience she was eager to translate into a legislative agenda.
On the dais, she cultivated dual identities: She was a standard-bearer for the city’s left flank — championing social housing, utility shut-off bans and higher pay for educators — while steadily building credibility on municipal oversight, from tracking down delayed leaf pickups to probing school maintenance backlogs inside the Department of General Services.
She frames municipal governance in moral terms; at a September mayoral debate, she argued the District’s affordability crises “aren’t inevitable.”
“They are a result of choices,” she said. “A choice of who you decide to center and a choice of who you decide to listen to.”
Because the District’s lopsided Democratic electorate made her decisive June primary victory the de facto general election, Lewis George was able to use the four months between the primary and Nov. 3 crisscrossing all eight wards for community listening sessions while using her remaining time on the council to prepare the city’s legislative plumbing for her arrival.
“I’m getting things done that I wanted to have prepared for me in January, ready to go,” Lewis George said after speaking at a climate summit held at Georgetown University in mid-October. “People will start getting their high utility bills in January. We’ll be in the hot seat automatically. Pushing things through now is intentional.”
Beyond anticipating constituent sticker shock, she spent the fall session signaling that she is attuned to the city’s broader fiscal squeeze, notably opposing a planned pay raise for the incoming mayor.
Yet that same afternoon at Georgetown offered a sharp preview of how Lewis George handles some governing fractures. During the summit, both she and Ward 6 council member Charles Allen spoke forcefully to the room of environmental advocates, echoing each other’s calls for corporate utility accountability. But just hours later, after leaving the campus to prepare for a council tax hearing and pick up her son from day care, Lewis George posted a public statement opposing Allen’s bill that would establish regulatory guardrails for autonomous vehicles like Waymo — siding with labor unions that helped fuel her campaign and argue that deploying robotaxis would threaten local driving jobs.
She did, however, give Allen a private heads-up before the statement went out.
“What you have in her is she genuinely wants to understand a different perspective,” Allen said. “Where there is a disagreement, she will state her position loud and clear, and she will be able to still work with somebody who says, ‘You know what? I see that issue differently. There’s probably 99 issues we agree on. Let’s make sure we focus on those.’”
Even so, personal warmth only goes so far. Allen made clear that Lewis George’s opposition would not stop him from advancing his autonomous vehicle bill to a vote.
“I know her concerns. I respect them. We just disagree on this one issue,” he said.
That dynamic — where ideological splits are hashed out up front without blowing up working partnerships — is what more moderate members of the council hope to see as they brace for a grueling budget season. Pinto, the Ward 2 legislator who joined the council around the same time as Lewis George and clashed with her over major public safety legislation, pointed to their quarterly dinners with Henderson and Parker as proof that floor fights do not have to poison personal relationships.
“I always return to a faith and belief in one’s intentions,” Pinto said. “I know that I wake up every morning trying to improve the lives and experiences of District residents, and I know the same is true of council member Lewis George.”
Still, Pinto, who is pursuing the chairmanship of the Business and Economic Development Committee for the upcoming council period, signaled that she intends to press the incoming mayor aggressively on revitalizing the local economy.
“This is not theoretical. These are actions that we take every day that impact our residents’ lives,” Pinto warned, pointing to regional economic contractions. “We have 100,000 people who’ve lost their job in the region over the last year, and so this cannot be a bite-sized or piecemeal strategy. We have to be really focused on turning things around.”
The Isolation Trap
Lewis George has worked to institutionalize her relationships to avoid becoming walled off in the executive suite. Following her primary win, she and Mendelson began sitting down for one-on-one breakfasts, meeting in July and again in September.
For Mendelson, the outreach marks a departure from the past 12 years under an executive who, he noted, rarely walked the halls of the Wilson Building to cultivate personal relationships with colleagues. While he and Bowser held formal meetings over the years, he said they rarely involved breaking bread. He likened Lewis George’s style to the intimate, hall-walking collegiality of the Marion Barry era — a welcome shift, Mendelson said, though he offered a warning: The mayor’s office inevitably alters the gravitational pull between branches, whether its occupant wants it to or not.
That distance between the incoming and outgoing mayors is rooted in six years of sharp ideological divergence. Bowser governed from the pro-business center, championing downtown commercial incentives and sweeping tough-on-crime policies. Lewis George was one of the administration’s most formidable progressive foils, routinely dissenting on punitive policing measures in favor of root-cause violence prevention. When Bowser declined to seek a fourth term, there was little personal rapport to build on — and ahead of the June primary, the mayor made no secret of her preference for former At-Large council member Kenyan McDuffie over the democratic socialist from her own backyard in Ward 4.
Speaking on Election Day, however, Lewis George said the two women have begun finding common ground, bonding during preliminary transition talks as “one daughter of the District to another” over how to navigate running the city while protecting time for their young children and aging mothers. Publicly, Bowser has offered a more pointed institutional reminder: Occupying the mayor’s office requires enough pragmatism to cut deals across the ideological aisle, particularly when dealing with the city’s federal overseers.
Lewis George will enter the executive suite with a far friendlier legislative map than the one Bowser navigated in her final term. With a council that has shifted decisively to the left, Lewis George will enjoy a working majority of ideological allies. And following a sweeping national election that handed Democrats control of Congress, she will have a crucial buffer on Capitol Hill — even as she works to schedule a sit-down with President Donald Trump to pitch shared regional priorities like expanding Union Station and fully funding D.C. Superior Court.
Navigating Capitol Hill will also test her partnership with incoming D.C. Delegate Robert White, a close friend and political ally. While the District’s top elected officials have at times struggled to stay on the same page in recent years — particularly when navigating congressional interference — White said he and Lewis George have formed a strict co-governing pact. Anchored by a deep personal bond over growing up in working-class, single-parent D.C. households, they plan to meet privately every three weeks — alongside regular sit-downs with Mendelson and D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb — to hash out strategy. White said their ground rule is straightforward: On federal matters, Lewis George will defer to him; on local matters, he will publicly defer to the mayor.
“I just don’t think we have seen the type of close relationships at the highest elected offices for as long as I can remember — and it doesn’t serve the city well,” White said. “We still see each other as partners and are willing to defend each other to people in our circles that don’t like the other one.”
The Empathy Test
Maintaining that personal accessibility while preparing to run a city has required Lewis George to completely reorganize her daily clock. Her alarm now goes off at 4:45 a.m. Twice a week, she is at the gym by 5:30 a.m. for personal training, carving out early hours so she can return home to get Pierce ready for the day before the political calendar takes hold. She and Kyle vie over who gets the joy of handling school pickup and drop-off — a family boundary her staff is instructed to protect.
When events run late, Kyle jumps in to intercept Pierce, a logistical relay race that Lewis George says is made possible by a family support network that includes her mother and mother-in-law, who regularly takes the Amtrak down from Philadelphia to help with child care.
But the trappings of executive power have begun creeping into her daily routine. Accustomed to driving herself, Lewis George began being ferried and flanked by a security detail after clinching the June primary — a loss of privacy she has found deeply strange. And while she projects relentless warmth in public, carrying the compounded grief and friction of an entire city leaves her depleted by the time she walks across her own threshold at night.
Nowhere was that emotional weight clearer than during her autumn listening tour, which exposed the gulf between the city’s affluent enclaves and its working-class tenants — and the limits of governing by consensus.
More than 500 residents RSVP’d for her listening session on a crisp evening in late September at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Church in Ward 3, the wealthiest corner of the city and the only ward she lost in the June primary.
Lewis George worked to disarm the skeptical Upper Northwest crowd with retail charm. She reminded them that she had attended nearby Alice Deal Middle School and pitched her focus on basic city services — including fixing 911 dispatch delays, picking up an abandoned Christmas tree that had been sitting in an alley until July and filming a video to recruit the city’s new “rat czar.”
Over in the housing circle, however, the neighborhood’s fault lines flared into the open. A Ward 3 renter blasted the Rock Creek West planning area for achieving just 11% of the affordable housing target set by the city. Moments later, a homeowner drew grimaces from renters in the circle by warning the incoming mayor “not to demonize developers.”
Across town last month, the stakes were far more visceral at a packed tenant town hall inside the sanctuary of Peoples Congregational United Church of Christ in Ward 4. Renters stepped to the microphone to recount harrowing living conditions: a woman who broke her ankle in 16-degree weather outside a building with inadequate accessibility, seniors living with chronic mold and an apartment building where a faulty elevator severed a resident’s arm.
Lewis George told the crowd from the altar that she would be transparent with them — but warned the city would have to partner with housing providers and private developers to build more units and resolve mounting arrears. A quiet tension settled over the sanctuary.
“When these officials get on these mics, they get in that chair, they don’t do nothing,” a retired senior who lives in Cascade Park Apartments, where residents have complained of inadequate conditions, told her bluntly. “I’m tired of fighting. But I’m going to give you a try.”
In another room, Malinda Frevert, a tenant leader at Dorchester House whose neighbor lost her arm in the building’s elevator, pleaded with Lewis George to inject basic humanity into the Department of Buildings, calling the agency “cold and unfeeling.”
“All I want is some empathy,” Frevert said.
Whether empathy and listening sessions can survive a fiscal crunch is the exact question keeping downtown business leaders on edge.
Lewis George admitted at the September debate that the single hardest reality she faces in January is a federal health care cliff: With the Trump administration rolling back Medicaid access and adding eligibility barriers, D.C. hospitals and clinics face a wave of uninsured patients just as local revenue growth stalls. To protect the safety net and help fund her flagship campaign promises — including universal child care and building 72,000 housing units over five years — she has proposed closing a “tax loophole” on partnerships like large law and lobbying firms through a new Business Activity Tax that her campaign says could yield more than $500 million for the District.
That proposal is seen as a dangerous gamble in the business community, where many say D.C. is facing its worst economic outlook in 30 years. At a recent council hearing, former Mayor Anthony Williams testified that targeting law firms during a commercial real estate slump is “not a risk worth taking.”
Malcom Fox, executive director of the business-backed group Opportunity D.C., said that while entrepreneurs appreciate Lewis George’s willingness to engage, some reacted with frustration to her campaign video at Dukem. Watching the incoming mayor ask a closing restaurant how the city could help small businesses struck some owners as a “profound sense of irony,” Fox said. He cited her Election Day vote in favor of a ban on foie gras, which was opposed by some local restaurateurs.
“Listening and positivity is probably better than not listening and being outwardly confrontational, but I don’t think it’s sufficient to win over very skeptical District entrepreneurs,” Fox said. “It will have to go far beyond tone and posture, and translate to real legislative actions.”
After casting her vote last week, Lewis George signaled that she is ready to deal. Asked about business leaders’ anxiety over the Business Activity Tax, she acknowledged that enacting the measure on its own would backfire and said it must be paired with tax relief elsewhere, echoing recommendations from the city’s Tax Revision Commission.
“I heard them loud and clear,” Lewis George said.
Still, Fox argued that governing in a fiscal downturn is inherently zero-sum and that business leaders will be paying special attention to her cabinet to see if her appointments prioritize pragmatism over progressive loyalty.
Speaking to reporters the morning after her victory, Lewis George appeared eager to answer that skepticism head-on, unveiling a transition team anchored by seasoned government operators. She said residents expected her to hire directors and deputy mayors who “had experience doing the work — that weren’t just loyal to me, but loyal to service delivery for District residents.”
But even her closest allies acknowledge the honeymoon of a listening tour will end the moment her first budget lands on the council dais.
“The only way to maintain your integrity is you have to be willing to upset your friends sometimes,” White said. “I see too many people in elective office who can’t upset their friends, and they then lose their credibility and the trust of the people.”
Asked after casting her ballot last week how she plans to tell the grassroots allies who helped power her rise “no,” Lewis George didn’t flinch.
“All I can give them is the ‘why,’” Lewis George said, “and the honesty and the integrity to look them in the eye when I do it.”
* * *
Inside Dukem, as the evening crowd thinned and the clock ticked closer to the restaurant’s final night, Tefera offered a single word for how her family was handling the end of a 30-year run: “savor.”
Lewis George repeated the word under her breath, turning it over to her communications director, as if testing how it might fit into the lexicon of an incoming administration.
“We’ve done the work,” Lewis George said, ordering one last glass of pineapple juice, while Pierce stayed curled in her lap. “I think all the anxiety and stress is done. We’re now in execute mode. Doing the things that have to get done. And the city feels ready.”
Then, the political performance stopped. Throughout the fall, Lewis George had insisted that the only way to survive her mayoral transition was to enforce ruthless boundaries around her humanity. Now, she put the theory into practice.
She thanked the Tefera family and politely dismissed her communications staff, the videographer and the reporter hovering by the table — leaving the incoming mayor alone with her family in the warm glow of a changing city.
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